Re: Clarifying what a URL identifies (Four Uses of a URL)

David Booth wrote:

>
> Sandro, Roy and others have recently been discussing what a URI identifies
> (related to the open TAG issue httpRange-14 [1]).  I have written a new
> document, "Four Uses of a URL: Name, Concept, Web Location and Document
> Instance", that attempts to help clarify and illustrate the issue:
>
>          http://www.w3.org/2002/11/dbooth-names/dbooth-names_clean.htm .


Is this attempt at clarifying what a URL identifies intended to shed a
glimmer of light on what a URI is intended to identify? Seriously, since you
are attempting to be more precise, what exactly are you talking about?

>
> and the conclusions:
> [[
> In using URLs to identify concepts . . ., we need syntactic conventions
for
> denoting each of these four things . . . .
>
> If we wish to create a Semantic Web in which statements are unambiguous
and
> machine processable, then any machine-processable language that uses URLs
> must clearly specify which of these four things is intended when a URL is
> written in that language.  But for sanity across languages, it would be
> nice to have some common conventions.
> ]]
>

If you are going to use the (capitalized) term "Semantic Web", can you limit
yourselves to discussing the layers of the SW that have been concretely
defined i.e. the set of WDs produced by the RDF Core WG and the set of WDs
produced by the WebOnt WG?

In none of these documents do the problems you suggest with ambiguities in
URIs exist. For example, in none of these documents is there a shred of
confusion between a URI e.g.

http://www.w3.org/

and the string of characters that forms the URI i.e. 'h' 't' 't' 'p' ':' '/'
'/' ...

seriously ...

Jonathan

Received on Wednesday, 22 January 2003 23:18:56 UTC